1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to delivery of turnkey business computing appliance and more particularly to a system for managing the end to end lifecycle across all of the components of the virtualization environment within an appliance in an integrated fashion and a reference architecture that enables high IOPS performance of storage and high availability of the virtualization environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
The traditional way the IT (Information Technology) systems are implemented including setup of a virtualization environment requires a set of manual steps for installing and configuring each of the management software and infrastructure software components on the top of a server hardware, manual effort of creating application images, provisioning users and assigning application images to users. These manual steps result in significant amount of effort and any issues with any of the software components may result in months of troubleshooting leading to delays. IT systems are often implemented directly on physical hardware with direct dependency on storage IOPS (Input Output Per Second) performance of the physical hardware. IT systems often lack high availability architecture to achieve the desired levels of reliability.
There has been a partial response to this problem. U.S. Pat. No. 8,863,124 issued to M. Aron entitled, “ARCHITECTURE FOR MANAGING I/O AND STORAGE FOR A VIRTUALIZATION ENVIRONMENT,” discloses an improved approach to implement I/O and storage device management in a virtualization environment. According to some approaches disclosed in that patent, a Service VM is employed to control and manage any type of storage device, including directly attached storage in addition to networked and cloud storage. The Service VM implements the Storage Controller logic in the user space, and can be migrated as needed from one node to another. IP-based requests are used to send I/O request to the Service VMs. The Service VM can directly implement storage and I/O optimizations within the direct data access path, without the need for add-on products.